A while back, we made a Hivemind vow to steer clear of Second Life reportage, as it’s an MMO that so often suffers a ridiculously inflated, distorted profile in its press coverage, and we really don’t want to add to that. Occasionally though, there’s a story that isn’t about some past-it band holding a fake gig there or someone else revealing that they regularly have fake sex in it, and it’s worth a mention here.

In this case, it’s the news that The Trident Media Group, which is responsible for the much-milked Frank Herbert Estate, has dealt out a harsh smackdown to a few Second Life Dune Fans – demanding they remove all direct references to the books from their carefully-made Arrakis-inspired areas because…. because…. well, you tell me.
An ill-thought out fear that too many people might get wind of it, and enjoy a near-free Dune Online? Simple knee-jerk IP-protection? Whichever, it’s very hard to see what the demands to remove all Herbert-derived names’n’areas’n’characters achieves, bar driving a wedge between Dune fans and the Dune property. If, as is more than possible, it’s because there’s an official Dune MMO in the works (and it’s a well-suited license to one, in all honesty), surely this would have made a fine testing-of-the-waters, rather than a threat?

As another demonstration of quite how futile an action this was by Trident, SL’s Dune area had just 130 members, only 20% of which were estimated to be active players. What’ll now probably happen is the membership of the now-generic but still existent space-desert zone will suddenly swell because loads of folk have heard about it as a result of news stories. Good work, Trident. Not only have you created a swathe of bad will towards the Dune license, but you’ve shot your own nasty plan in the foot.

Nonetheless, it’s extremely worrying that SL owners Linden have complied with Trident’s demands, as it potentially opens the door to any number of similar IP vampires sinking their soulless fangs into the necks of modders and fans. Let’s hope this is a one-off.

In this case, what the fuck are these idiots thinking? There is ‘defending your IP’ and ‘needlessly pissing off people who love your stuff’.
When your only income is milking a series of books from decades ago, surely you want people to do stuff that keeps it in the news?
*sheesh* as the americans say,

Second Life suffers for its reputation of being a haven of porn. Having spent some time on SL, I know for a fact that it’s not all full of shit.

I tried one of these Dune sims a while back. If you wade through the 1000s of other sims full of crap, you’ll eventually find something like this. A very well crafted area designed to encourage role-play. And I once happened upon some fans giving some very convincing RP there.

Sometimes gravy-train experience mining isn’t required for a solid online “gaming” experience. It’s a shame Trident have taken this stance, as there’s obviously a fanbase out there that desire more Dune games.

Corporations sending cease and dissist latters to their fans because their breaking some old books IP because they made some sand Dunes and some bars in the name even though these fans love the book. Not actually very surprising really.

In order to maintain IP protection, you have to go after everyone who violates, no matter how little the effect of that particular violation. To not do so leaves yourself open to the precedent screwing you over when you want to go after something important. Sure, they look like dicks doing this, but they don’t really have any other option.

@SuperNashwan Despite all the noise regarding trademark infringement issues, which this seems to be, I’m not sure that they’re really that well tested (and thus defined) at the moment. It’s that fact which I think is the root cause of many of these kinds of things. It’s still a bit unclear what happens in this scenario:

1. I set up a DuneWorld Online that I make no money whatsoever from.
2. Trident is made explicitly aware of this product
3. Trident takes no action against me in a reasonable time frame.
4. I monetize the product directly (via subscription) or indirectly (via ads).

I think it’s this fact that what happens next is somewhat nebulous that scares them away. Trademarks are handled almost exclusively as private litigation in the US, and as such penalties can be levied against either party. That means if Trident sued me in the above scenario, one of the possible outcomes is that they could lose their trademark protection over Dune, simply because they sued me.

Until some of the trademark / copyright fair-use laws in the US are expanded and/or clarified by legal challenges to claims like this, I don’t think it’s going to stop any time soon.

I’m certainly not putting any blame on Herbert, but let’s face it, the franchise is strung out, and it’s because the estate was churning out crap spinoffs.

It’s ironic really, they did actually have a decent property for games, I mean Dune II was the prototype for the entire modern RTS genre. If they were smart about this they could have easily spun this idea into a moneymaker. Even after all this time, there’s still an opportunity for a franchise as loved as Dune to make a comeback in some form. IIRC the TV mini-series was met with a fair amount of love for what it did.

There isn’t much game to the Dune sims. They’re Role Play sims, which are just a community of creative writers ating out the roles of various characters. It’s not really like an MMO, to be honest. The only game-like element to it is WASD movemen controls and the possibility of vehicles. there’s also the Dynamic Combat System, but that’s only used when role play leads to combat, and even then there are other options to the system. There’s no leveling or classes, unless you count the DCS classes that are…mostly just fancy titles, and come with only a few extra DCS abilitis, which people rarely use.

But this is troubling…I my slef am an avid role player, and I especially like the Star Wars sims. If Lucas ever got cranky and started mucking with the Star Wars sims, SL would become pointless to me.

On top of that, if all the companies started scouring SL for copyright enfringement…well, SL would close down. As in there would be a very large amount of content that would need to be removed, because SL’s a twisted parody of real life. It’s like the movies! They play up the sex and violence and get less and less origional every day.

Oh, and kudo’s to you, RPS, for having the dignity to stay off the “WTF SECOND LIFE!?” bandwagon.

I’ve often thought a Dune inspired MMO would be awesome. You’ve the different Houses (both Major and Minor) which would be your character ‘race’, different professions (spice hunter, water merchant, ornithopter spotter/scout, Fedaykin/Sardaukar warrior, etc), different planets to explore (Arrakis, Ix, Tleilaxu, Caladan, Geidi Prime, etc), maybe chuck in some space combat/trading too, with the game tech starting to allow seamless transition between planetside and space (See EVE, Jumpgate Evolution).

There’s already a staggering amount of lore and backstory to draw on too, deep with political machinations from the Guild, the Sisterhood, Tleilaxu, etc.

Hmm. And here I was, thinking that the first book alone was a masterpiece and everything that followed was shit. Herbert wasn’t a genius – he told a great story and then f’d it up long before his idiot son got involved.

I wish there was someone else I could blame for the last couple Hitchhiker’s books. Herbert got lucky, having little Brian jump in. Everyone blames him, forgetting Frank’s own transgressions.

Strangly enough I was looking at this old Strafe Left cartoon featured in the “Revist an old Story” box. Which linked to an old forum topic about Northrop Grumman trying to squeeze money out of developers for featuring “their” planes in WWII sims.

Trident media are afraid that any Dune-related content they don’t own might be better than what they’ve done (and allowed to be written) in the name of that estate. They should be — wouldn’t be hard to be better than the “Dune in name only” pap they’ve published in the last decade or so.

I know the topic of this post is copyright-asshattery, and not RPS’s particular journalistic bent, but:

A while back, we made a Hivemind vow to steer clear of Second Life reportage, as it’s an MMO that so often suffers a ridiculously inflated, distorted profile in its press coverage, and we really don’t want to add to that.

I don’t get this. Second Life is a topic that is badly reported on, and therefore you’ve decided not to report on it at all? Maybe I’ve misunderstood your intention, but that’s just ridiculous.

(I would’ve edited my previous post to append this bit, but I can’t, so:) The RPS I know and love would, I hope, prefer to address bad journalism about a game by providing better journalism, not by avoiding the game altogether!

I loved the first book and i *LOVED* the god emperor of dune. They other books? Hmmmm, kinda acceptable but nothing special.

The thing for companies to do in situations like this is to give limited permission to the people doing fan-things like this, if they are forced to admitt that they are aware of it. Like what T. Pratchett does for discworld mud. Using the “cease-and-decist” sledgehammer on small projects like the SL one just makes them look like assholes.

@ChampionHyena: My first exposure to Dune was House Atreides… or House Harkonnen… and since I hadn’t read the original material yet, I enjoyed them a lot. At least now I can read Frank Herbert’s book as a step up.